The manufacture and/or use of illegal drugs are believed to pose a great threat to real property and personal welfare across the United States. Manufacturing methamphetamine alone can be extremely costly to property owners as well as dangerous to those who inhale fumes generated during the manufacturing process. The average clean up cost of a lab can easily run into thousands of dollars. Often this clean up cost is borne by insurance companies or land owners after rogue tenants perform unauthorized activities. The health risks to the occupants are more difficult to quantify.
One of the existing technologies that detect air contamination is called gas chromatography (GC). Currently, GC systems are bulky, expensive, and slow. High speed and affordable detection systems are believed to be needed for real time detection of illegal drugs such as meth labs. Current gas chromatography systems available are not believed to be practical for such use.
A second technology uses the concept of mass spectrometry. Beside their cumbersomeness, mass spectrometry systems are believed to be very expensive and not suitable for a real time detection system.
The inventor is not aware of the availability of any stand alone portable low cost system that is capable of detecting, in real time, multiple illegal drugs at the same time. The only known affordable and portable technology for detecting meth labs in the United States is done after a meth cook has already taken place using meth scanners.
This invention is motivated by the lack of available technology sophisticated enough to perform warning about the presence of illegal drugs in real time, yet simple, portable, and rugged enough to be easily deployed.
Currently no device is known to be available to automatedly detect the manufacturing and/or use of illegal drugs and warn interested parties of such activity. Accordingly, there is believed to be a need for sensors configured to detect and advise others of the presence of likely illegal drug activity and whereby an alarm is generated to provide notification to at least one interested party such as a property owner of likely illegal drug activity at a particular location.